Poetry in the city

When you visit cities in the Netherlands, you can expect to see canals, quaint streets lined with brick buildings and many, many bicycles. But one Dutch urban tradition may surprise you: displaying poetry on city walls.

The Dutch tradition muurgedichten is a way of bringing poems to streets, displaying their texts on posters, billboards or often built into the very fabric of buildings. These cultural expressions can add historic or social context to the Dutch cityscapes, or provide a sense of community and identity for cities and their residents.

The tradition is believed to have originated in the 1970s, when poets and artists in Amsterdam started writing and painting poems on the walls of the city as a way to make poetry more accessible to the general public.

The wall poetry tradition has since spread to other cities in the Netherlands. Wall poems can be found on a variety of surfaces, including brick walls, storefronts and even traffic signs. The poems are often written in Dutch, but may also be written in other languages.

In 1992, Leiden was the first city to adopt an official approach to muurgedichten. The first poem displayed was by Marina Tsvetaeva. By 2005, a hundred poems were displayed on Leiden's streets, including work by William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Sappho and William Butler Yeats.

Many wall poems by established poets are created, as well offering the opportunity to aspiring writers and artists to share their work with the public. The tradition is supported by a number of organisations and festivals in the Netherlands - such as Poëzieweek (Poetry Week) which is held in January / February - and is an important part of the country's literary and artistic culture.

Beyond the Netherlands, other countries share the tradition of displaying poetry in cities - such as these examples from Berlin, Manchester, Paris and Sheffield.